A small item on the Sacramento Bee’s web site caught my attention today as it illustrates how politicians in California see themselves as royalty of the sort. Here it is, in total:

The Department of Motor Vehicles announced it’s eliminating Saturday hours this month to cope with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s layoffs, but one office remains open – if a bit hard to find. The unmarked DMV office, room 121, buried in a dark corner of the Legislative Office Building across the street from the Capitol, is devoted to serving the Legislature and its staff. The catch: that section of the building is not open to the public and security refuses to give directions.

I called DMV Spokesman Michael Marando this morning to confirm this. He said this is somewhat misleading as the office never was open on Saturday (which makes sense. What pol is going to work on Saturday?). But still, they need their own office?

How do our State Senators and Assembly folk want to fill the hole in our budget? Plug it with porn! Yes, what we cannot raise through general taxes, we can get up by levying a tax on the production and consumption of pornography. Talk about a sin tax!

Pornography is a thriving cottage, and often mansion, industry in California and in our own San Fernando Valley in particular. Virtually anytime I drive past a large home in the Encino hills with all the windows darkened, I assume they are either growing pot or producing porn.

The porn industry creates jobs, trains the next generation of gaffers, directors, cinematographers–and of course “talent.” It is the bubbling spa cum cesspool from which infomercials are born, that in turn beget music videos and may lead even to TV and legitimate movies. Though to be fair to porn, it is increasingly hard to distinguish legit from porn.

And therein may lay the back rub. How shall we determine which productions are doing porn and which are either art or commerce? How shall we define porn? Yes, yes, I know we may not be able to define it but we know it when we see it. But most importantly, who gets to see it? Who has to watch the dailies (or should they be called “nightlies?”)? What panel passes on porn?

How many porn shoots take out permits, and will imposing the 25% suggested tax drive them further undercover–or even out of the state? In the immortal words of H. Ross Perot, “That giant sucking sound you hear will be jobs going to Mexico.”

Our elected geniuses in Sacramento also want to stick it to the hardworking porn consumers and lay on another stiff tax by adding another 25% on the other end–the consumers’ end.

So if pornography turns out like the lottery and we become dependant on what was once a sin (Gambling in the case of the lottery), will the State then begin to promote porn? Will they give tax breaks in an attempt to attract an expanding industry? Will it become a new civic virtue to support local porn? I can see the marketing slogan: Fantasize Global but Buy Local. Of course, they would never directly tell us to support porn with taxpayer funds, only ask us to give it not a handout but a hand.

The Governor is trying to bet on the lottery. He has about the same chance of his lottery paying off as any of us–which is none to speak of.

I am a liberal Brie-eating condescending elitist snob. I am also a believer, along with Ronald Reagan, that taxes should hurt, that they should be visible and not be hidden in fees or other ruses. I object to the garbage fees being raised, the parking meters extracting more and the fines increased for every kind of infraction. These are all badly disguised taxes and are essentially dishonest. I also object to our police, who have important work to do in protecting and serving us, being conscripted into revenue agents.

But I save a special kind of irk and ire for the lottery and the Governor’s plot to sell futures in lottery proceeds. Even if the earnings from the lottery were to increase as he fantasizes, (and no one with actual or actuarial knowledge believes his numbers) we would be running California by taxing the false hopes of the poor, the desperate and the uneducated.

Does anyone remember old films that showed the corruption of “The Numbers Racket?” These involved the Mob (usually considered to be the bad guys) taking bets on random numbers that would be revealed by the saddle numbers of the winners of the first four races at Hialeah. Well, the government seems to have decided that taking illicit gambling away from private enterprise and co-opting it for themselves moved it from being immoral to not only moral but now a civic duty. “Buy a lottery ticket for the kids,” they plead.

Who plays the numbers in our state run numbers racket? The poor and desperate. This is a tax on the poor. A tax on ignorance. When the lottery started in California, locally Gelson’s and other high-end markets offered tickets. But the socio-economic segment of society that could afford 5 bucks didn’t buy in sufficient numbers to keep the machines in such venues. This is not because the wealthy don’t want more money or have no dreams of greater and unearned wealth. They just understand the odds better and decided to spend only a tiny percentage of their income on tickets, compared with the poor.

When the lottery began, I objected to it because it is a sneaky and cruel way of extracting money, and I believed it would, be unfair to the poor and uneducated. I was called a snob and an elitist. I was accused of believing that I knew better how to spend my resources than poor and uneducated people. I was a class snob. Okay. But was I, am I, wrong?

Some say that a voluntary self-tax, in the form of wagering, is better than the involuntary taxes imposed on us by government. They compare the gains from they lottery to sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco. This is a fair argument–except that funding some portion of healthcare from activities that promote ill health has a karmic kind of justice. Funding education through a tax on a bad judgment seems an injustice.

Our schools deserve direct and chosen support. The lottery has already broken the essential deal that brought it into existence and that was that the proceeds would not be used to off-set the educational budget but to augment it. They lied then about what the lottery would do. So, the question is: Are they lying now? You can make book on it.

The wisdom of Homer Simpson, it seems, has found its way up to Sacramento. A freshman lawmaker hopes to ease the state’s budget crunch by jacking up the state’s tax on brew by a stunning 1,400 percent.

Assemblyman Jim Beall, D-San Jose, proposes raising the tax on beer from two cents per can or bottle to 30 cents. As even Homer Simpson can calculate, that would amount to $1.80 a six-pack.